Battle looms in Galesburg public housing debate

Tuesday

Dec 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2008 at 5:51 PM

A report issued by a number of community leaders last week calling for a cap on new public housing developments in Galesburg has sparked controversy, with two mayoral candidates on opposing sides of the debate.

Eric Timmons

A report issued by a number of community leaders last week calling for a cap on new public housing developments in Galesburg has sparked controversy, with two mayoral candidates on opposing sides of the debate.

“A Call to Action, Poverty in Knox County,” a report released by businessman Rick Sundberg, recommends a moratorium on zoning for new multi-family housing units, which would stop the development of new public housing projects.

Sundberg said it is time Galesburg stopped accepting public housing candidates from Chicago, and that capping multi-family developments would be a step toward achieving this goal.

The report was written by a group that includes Knox County Regional Superintendent of Schools Bonnie Harris, Chamber of Commerce President Bob Maus and alderwoman Karen Lafferty.

It includes reports from the education and healthcare sectors on the impact rising poverty is having locally, but offers no statistics that link those problems to people moving to Galesburg from elsewhere in the state. No figures are provided for the number of public housing candidates from Chicago who have moved here in recent years.

Mayoral candidate Sal Garza, who is the chair of a separate poverty task force, Team Knox County, said the report was “short-sighted.”

The recommendation to place a moratorium on multi-family housing in Galesburg would likely have a negative impact on the local economy, he said.

“From an economic development perspective it isn’t very well thought through,” he said. According to Garza, limiting the availability of affordable housing would make it more difficult for service industries looking to expand here, as workers would have nowhere to live.

Less affordable housing would also make it more difficult for people who lose their homes to stay in Galesburg, Garza argued.

“If the intent is to say we are not going to build any low to moderate income housing then people losing their homes will not have a fallback,” he said.

Garza also cautioned against making a particular group of people scapegoats for wider problems, especially without statistics to back up the argument.

“I think it is always wrong to stereotype,” he said. “Lets go back and see what the numbers show,” he said.

Garza was critical of the statement Sundberg made to The Register-Mail last week, when Sundberg said most of the people coming to Galesburg to live in public housing were “unproductive.”

“To make a general statement like that without having statistics, I would say, would offer an imbalanced perspective,” Garza said.

Alderwoman Karen Lafferty, Ward 5, who will face Garza in April’s mayoral election, is standing by the report’s recommendations.

She said Sunday she is in favor of stopping “anything that could possibly be Section 8 housing.”

Lafferty said public housing residents who move here from Chicago caused “chaos” in local schools.

“It is unfair and we can’t continue to take the poverty from Chicago,” she said. “We have enough poverty ourselves.”

Lafferty added, “I’m 100 percent for anybody from Chicago that wants to come down here and get an education and better themselves. ... But unfortunately it seems like the ones we get, they don’t want to go to school, don’t come with transcripts or know what inoculations they’ve had, and it causes chaos.”

She said it was easy for people to move back and forth between Galesburg and Chicago, and that was why many moved to public housing here. “We get a lot of them because we are on the train line,” she said.

Lafferty added that she realized her position would attract criticism and emphasized that she was not motivated by prejudice.

“No matter how much it hurts me I’ve got to stand on our (the poverty report’s) findings,” she said. “I am not prejudiced.”

Sundberg said the “A Call to Action, Poverty in Knox County” will be presented to the city council in the coming weeks and distributed to State. Rep. Don Moffitt, R-Gilson, and Congressman Phil Hare, D-Rock Island.

County Board member Dale Parsons, D-District 3, who sits on the board of the Knox County Housing Authority, said the numbers of people moving here to live in public housing are small.

Parsons also said that blaming one group of people for crime and poverty was a way of masking bigger problems.

“I don’t think people need to be blamed for this,” he said. “We need to look at the deeper problems, like jobs and the economy.”

Parsons also said that many of the social problems in Knox County originated closer to home than some are prepared to accept. “There are a lot of local problems that we don’t want to admit,” he said.